I, like most people cannot stand ironing. I try to avoid it where I can but unfortunately my husband and I work jobs where we need to be dressed smart at all times. This means that trousers, jackets and shirts often need ironing as well as other items when we are going out with friends or just generally wanting to smarten up our look. My husband often claims to be rubbish at ironing yet if I am away visiting relatives or on business he somehow manages to iron his own shirts and other items. My husband has a logo on his work shirts and on more than one occasion with our old irons he managed to iron some of the black on to the iron and then on to the ironing board. I found that no matter what I did I couldn't actually get this to wash off either the iron or the ironing board so I needed to find myself a new cover.

My ironing board is from Ikea, as my last one got broken when I dropped it by accident, and it seems to be a fairly normal sized board. The ironing board cover that I purchased was from JML and came from Wilkinsons, I believe I paid somewhere between £6 and £7 but I can't remember exactly how much. This is advertised as being a fast fit ironing board cover designed to fit pretty much every size ironing board in a matter of seconds. My particular cover is the purple spotted one which is quite widely available from what I can see and this can be purchased on Amazon for a similar price to what I paid also. I am not fussy about what my ironing board looks like despite not liking to keep my board with a dirty cover on it.

This ironing board cover has an elasticated edge, for simple fitting, 3mm thick foam for a smooth glide over the top with your iron and a thick polyester underlay that allows heat to be reflected allowing you to iron both sides of something with ease. Now when fitting this ironing board cover to our ironing board it becomes clear that this is designed with even the largest ironing boards in mind. This means that there is lots of excess underneath my ironing board cover and when ironing I would find that the excess would start to bunch back up towards the ironing board meaning that I ironed over this and ironed creases back in to items I had almost finished ironing. This means that this ironing board cover hasn't been perfect from the start and I've had to fashion a way to gather up the excess underneath with a colour of large hair grip things to keep the cover that is across my ironing board taut and smooth. Without using hair grips to hold the excess in place this ironing board cover would actually be completely unusable.

With regards to the reflective surface this does work well and I only ever had to iron one side of shirts and other items but then I always have done this, even if the results haven't been 100%.

It is fair to say that I am going to rate this cover 1/5 stars. I feel that it is not as sturdy or robust as it looks as the gathering has lead to a couple of small tears and I'm sure that if I didn't have the excess gathered up that I wouldn't be able to iron on this at all. This cover really needs a bet way to adjust the excess as there is lots of wasted material and it just doesn't fit snugly at all. My neighbour, whose ironing board I borrowed when I broke my previous one, has a massive ironing board from Brabantia and I am sure that this would probably fit comfortably, however my ironing board is perhaps just a normal medium/small sized one and so this cover is massively oversized.

I would say that if you own a large Brabantia ironing board that this cover would be ideal for you, however if you have a normal supermarket board or Ikea board then this probably isn't going to be good for you at all. 1/5 from me - a disappointment.